Spending

A Utopian Divertimento

An erotic and highly intelligent new novel about women, art, sex, and money-- from the award-winning author of the New York Times bestsellers "Final Payments" and "Men and Angels". Newsweek has called Mary Gordon a "humane, masterly novelist whose great gift is making us care about her people."

Monica Szabo, a middle-aged, moderately successful painter, encounters B, a wealthy commodities broker who collects her work. B volunteers to be her muse, offering her everything that male artists have always had to produce great art: time, space, money, and sex. (He is even willing to pose for her.)

Soon after she and B become lovers, Monica starts work on a controversial new series of paintings based on her perception that the deposed Christs of Renaissance art were not dead, but postorgasmic. The show of her new work, championed by the critics and picketed by the Christian Right, makes her a media darling and makes her rich. B, meanwhile, suffers a sudden loss of fortune. Will she take care of him as he took care of her? How does he handle his loss of power? How does she? What happens in the bedroom?